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Twitter in Need of a Bailout?
In a recent e-mail message, Russell Wright of ThemeZoom and Krakken fame (whose stuff is always an excellent read) refers to yesterday’s article by TheFounder at Tribble Ad Agency: No revenue model Twitter takes out Digg in traffic (hey, what kind of an un-SEOed link is that, anyway?), asking the entirely pertinent question: “If you were VC, would you buy twitter?”
The fundamental issue isn’t really new, of course (remember the dotcom bubble?): how much cool can a company actually live off without turning a buck before investors will pull the plug?
Yes, Dell has recently avowed that they made a million dollars off their tweets, but they didn’t exactly bend over to share that revenue with Twitter. Which begs the question of who will be willing to buy them out, come credit crunch Phase 2, which could arguably be dubbed the “In for the Kill” or “Garage Sale” stage.
Obviously, we’re not expecting them to go down without kicking, but it’s really anybody’s guess if they’ll actually succeed at charging their users for the privilege of tweeting their cats’ temperature and their luncheon pix (ok, I may be exaggerating a bit here, but let’s face it: about 90% of these tweets will qualify for “trivia” by just about any standard.
One possible alternative would be some company picking up the tab – but they, too, would have to monetize it in some way and be it only in terms of branding. But is that a likely scenario considering the current Economic Apocalypse hysteria? You might be excused for nurturing some doubts…
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[ Keywords: credit crunch, microblogging, social networks, Twitter ]
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